Had a game night Saturday. First full game night in a *very* long time. Getting married, running a company and having my day job implode around me all at once seems to have taken a tole on my hobbies.
In any case, I played 3 games. Had a good time, would have liked to get a 4th game in, but the other table somehow managed a 4 hour game of Cyclades that prevented that from happening.
1) Galaxy Trucker - I hadn't played this before and really was looking forward to it. What an amazingly fun little game. I really liked it.. it had enough strategy but enough randomness to make me not overly mad about what was going on.. and watching your ship explode is probably a bit more fun than not.
We had a few rules that I think we were taught wrong. The teacher was going off memory and hadn't played the game in 6 months or so... we didn't use energy cubes to power up our shields which made them way too powerful and made closing connections off on the edge of you ship less important.
I want to get the game, but 75 dollars for what amounts to a party filler game? YEESH! Looked at the expansion, but it seems like the 5 player variant is half assed and the rest of it just adds unneeded complexity to a simple game.
2) Farmageddon. pretty typical "Take that" card game with very little strategy and too much randomness to get too worked up over. I may play it a few more times since the playtime is pretty nice for what it is. The end game is a total mess though. I don't see the point in having additional turns with no ability to draw cards, and the rule limiting the playing of 2 action cards a turn while making you draw 2 more action cards means you can never use the action cards you pile up.. I'll try it with the expansion deck in it next time to see if that adds some extra chaos to it.
3) Glen More. The definition of a pasted on theme. It's a tile laying game where each tile does something. It either gives you a resource, gives you an extra worker or lets you cash in workers and/or resources for victory points.
Picking up tiles happens along a track where players pawns play hop scotch over one another to get the tiles they want. If you jump to the end of the line of tiles to grab one you need, it means other players behind you may get several turns before you get your next as the player who is last in the line goes first.
Tiles also have a cost to them occasionally. Mostly to build buildings or what not that requires you to cash in resources.
The "wrinkle" of the game is you can only place tiles adjacent to tiles with workers on them (along with a couple other rules about tile placement), and you only get to use a tile when it is "activated", and tiles are only activated when a tile is either first placed or a tile is placed adjacent to it. So you need to carefully plan what you do. If you pick up a tile that lets you convert goods to VPs you need to make sure you can 1) get the goods needed to exchange for VPs. You need to make sure you can do it several times before the scoring tile is surrounded and can't be used again.
I really liked the game a lot. It's a pretty short game, with decent strategy to it, though it has some fiddleness and one of the worst written rule books I've ever seen. It glosses over critical rules but spends 4 paragraphs explaining why it saves time to not actually take a good from the bag if you are only buying the good in order to pay for a tile right then.
Still, fun little game with a very nice price point.
